Update: OOW Book Discussion – Work, Pray, Code 

On By Julia DessauerIn WorkshopsLeave a comment

OOW Book Discussion: New date – January 22

All OOW members are invited to participate in an informal, online discussion of Catherine Chen’s Work, Pray, Code on January 22nd, 12-1pm EST. The book is a brisk, qualitative study of how work becomes religion in Silicon Valley. The conversation will be “book club style”, with everyone welcome to share ideas. (If you’d like to participate but time is short, focus on the introduction & chapter 4.) 

We hope students and faculty alike come to discuss and meet with fellow OOW members. To register and receive a zoom link, click here.

Questions? Contact Laura Doering (laura.doering@utoronto.ca).

Job Posting: Postdoctoral Research Associate

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Date Position is Available: Spring 2024 (Fully remote option available) 

Job ID: 19813

Job Description

Joya Misra and Jessica Pearlman at the University of Massachusetts Amherst are seeking a Postdoctoral Fellow to engage in a large-scale multimethod project aimed at better understanding the pathways and challenges experienced by diverse STEM higher education leaders. The goal of the project is to understand how racialized and gendered organizations lead to differential access to leadership by race, gender, nationality, and other factors. The postdoc will work closely with the team to develop the sample, field and analyze a nationally representative survey, develop the interview protocol, and code and analyze the interview data. The person hired for this position will also play a key role in mentoring the graduate research assistants on the project. We offer professional development opportunities, including through a detailed postdoctoral mentoring plan, workshops provided by the Office of Professional Development, as well as mentoring around supervising student researchers and project management. The postdoc will have opportunities to present findings at academic conferences and to publish in academic journals, as well as for publicly engaged communication.

https://careers.umass.edu/amherst/en-us/job/521359/post-doctoral-research-associate-sociology

Questions about this can be directed to misra@umass.edu.

CFP: Digital Civil Society Lab Postdoctoral Fellowship

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https://pacscenter.stanford.edu/research/digital-civil-society-lab/dcsl-post-doctoral-fellowships/

The following information applies to applications for the 2024-25 cohort of postdoctoral fellows. The application cycle for this cohort will open on November 16, 2023 and will close on January 15, 2024.

The Digital Civil Society Lab brings promising new scholars to Stanford University for 1 year appointments (renewable once, for a total of two years) as postdoctoral fellows. Each fellow will be primarily affiliated with the Digital Civil Society Lab, and potentially cross-affiliated with a department or school at Stanford University depending on the fellow’s specific disciplinary focus.

The annual fellowship stipend is $75,000 plus the standard benefits that postdoctoral fellows at Stanford University receive, including health insurance and travel funds. The fellowship program falls under U.S. Immigration J-1 Exchange Visitor Visa activities.

The start date of the fellowship will be September 2024, unless otherwise agreed. To assume a postdoctoral fellowship, scholars must have a PhD in hand by July 1, 2024. We cannot consider applications from scholars who earned a PhD earlier than September 1, 2021.

We encourage applications from candidates representing a broad range of disciplines including the social sciences, humanities, law, computer science and engineering.

New Publication: The Changing Role of Managers

On By Dilan ErenIn Announcements, PublicationsLeave a comment

The Changing Role of Managers (2023, AJS) by Letian Zhang.

This study argues that the increase in middle management in recent decades was accompanied by a shift in managerial roles. Increased task complexity and a new management philosophy have reduced the need for direct supervision but generated a greater demand for collaboration, leading to the emergence of a managerial class whose primary role is collaboration not supervision. The author analyzed a large volume of data to generate three sets of findings: (1) The expectations of the managerial role have quickly changed, in almost all sectors, to emphasize more collaboration and less supervision (2) This new managerial role is especially concentrated in innovation-focused firms. (3) Firms treating managers as collaborators have a higher proportion of middle managers than those still treating them primarily as supervisors. These findings suggest that the role of managers has fundamentally shifted and that accounting for changing managerial roles could explain a significant portion of the managerial growth.

New Publication: The fragility of artists’ reputations from 1795 to 2020

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The fragility of artists’ reputations from 1795 to 2020 by Letian Zhang, Mitali Banerjee, Shinan Wang, and Zhuoqiao Hong.

Abstract

This study explores the longevity of artistic reputation. We empirically examine whether artists are more- or less-venerated after their death. We construct a massive historical corpus spanning 1795 to 2020 and build separate word-embedding models for each five-year period to examine how the reputations of over 3,300 famous artists—including painters, architects, composers, musicians, and writers—evolve after their death. We find that most artists gain their highest reputation right before their death, after which it declines, losing nearly one SD every century. This posthumous decline applies to artists in all domains, includes those who died young or unexpectedly, and contradicts the popular view that artists’ reputations endure. Contrary to the Matthew effect, the reputational decline is the steepest for those who had the highest reputations while alive. Two mechanisms—artists’ reduced visibility and the public’s changing taste—are associated with much of the posthumous reputational decline. This study underscores the fragility of human reputation and shows how the collective memory of artists unfolds over time.

New Publications

On By Julia DessauerIn PublicationsLeave a comment

Kincaid, R., & Reynolds, J. (2023). Unconventional Work, Conventional Problems: Gig Microtask Work, Inequality, and the Flexibility Mystique. The Sociological Quarterly, 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1080/00380253.2023.2268679

Gig work platforms often promise workers flexibility and freedom from formal constraints on their work schedules. Some scholars have questioned whether this “formal flexibility” actually helps people arrange gig work around non-work commitments, but few studies have examined this empirically. This paper examines how hours spent in microtask work – a form of gig work with high formal flexibility – influence work-to-life conflict (WLC) relative to conventional work hours, and how these relationships differ by workers’ gender and financial situation. Fixed-effects regressions using panel data from workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform (MTurk) suggest that microtask work hours are just as closely associated with WLC as conventional work hours. Moreover, microtask work disadvantages the same groups as conventional work (i.e. women and financially struggling workers). Only financially comfortable men seem immune from microtask hours’ association with WLC. This suggests that the benefits of gig work’s formal flexibility are often elusive. We argue that platforms like MTurk promote a flexibility mystique: the illusory promise that gig work empowers workers to set their own schedules and earn decent income without disrupting their personal/family lives. The gig economy’s expansion may thus do little to bring work-life balance to the masses or alleviate inequalities at the work-life nexus.

The Accidental Equalizer: How Luck Determines Pay After College by Jessi Streib

A startling discovery—that job market success after college is largely random—forces a reappraisal of education, opportunity, and the American dream.

As a gateway to economic opportunity, a college degree is viewed by many as America’s great equalizer. And it’s true: wealthier, more connected, and seemingly better-qualified students earn exactly the same pay as their less privileged peers. Yet, the reasons why may have little to do with bootstraps or self-improvement—it might just be dumb luck. That’s what sociologist Jessi Streib proposes in The Accidental Equalizer, a conclusion she reaches after interviewing dozens of hiring agents and job-seeking graduates.

Streib finds that luck shapes the hiring process from start to finish in a way that limits class privilege in the job market. Employers hide information about how to get ahead and force students to guess which jobs pay the most and how best to obtain them. Without clear routes to success, graduates from all class backgrounds face the same odds at high pay. The Accidental Equalizer is a frank appraisal of how this “luckocracy” works and its implications for the future of higher education and the middle class. Although this system is far from eliminating American inequality, Streib shows that it may just be the best opportunity structure we have—for better and for worse.

CFP: EGOS 2024 – “The Impact of Organizational Practices on Workplace Diversity and Inequality”

On By Julia DessauerIn Calls for Papers, Calls for Participants, UncategorizedLeave a comment

EGOS 2024 – Milan, Italy
Subtheme 71: ” The Impact of Organizational Practices on Workplace Diversity and Inequality “

We would like to bring to your attention the colloquium on “The Impact of Organizational Practices on Workplace Diversity and Inequality,” which we are convening as part of the European Group of Organization Studies’ (EGOS) 40th annual conference in Milan, Italy. The conference will take place on July 4-6, 2024.

Our purpose is to bring together a group of researchers who share a concern for advancing our knowledge of the mechanisms through which organizations influence diversity and inequality in the labor market. We welcome papers from different disciplines and at all levels of analysis.

If you are interested, we encourage you to submit a short paper (3,000 words) before January 9th, 2024. You can access the call for papers here:

https://www.egos.org/jart/prj3/egos/main.jart?rel=de&reserve-mode=active&content-id=1662944489704&subtheme_id=1669874219526

Call for Participants: 2024 CASBS Summer Institute

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Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University

Organizations and Their Effectiveness

July 7 through July 20, 2024

Directors
Robert Gibbons (rgibbons@mit.edu), economics and management, MIT

Woody Powell (woodyp@stanford.edu), education and sociology, Stanford University

ABOUT THE CASBS SUMMER INSTITUTE

The sixth CASBS summer institute on Organizations and Their Effectiveness will occur from July 7 through July 20, 2024, at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences on the Stanford University campus. Fifteen fellowships will be awarded to cover tuition, room and board, and travel.

There are two important dates in the application process: (1) the complete application, including the letter of support, is due December 13, 2023; and (2) fellowship awards will be announced by email no later than January 29, 2024.

TOPICS AND PURPOSE

Organizations are all around us: not just firms, plants, and work groups, but also hospitals, schools, and governments. Furthermore, by construing an “organization” as something that can be first organized and then managed, one can also include certain relationships — not only between firms (such as some hand-in-glove supply relationships, joint ventures, and alliances) but also between a government and a firm (such as some regulatory relationships and public-private partnerships).Indeed, noting that the examples above are all opportunities to collaborate, one can move beyond formal organization charts and formal contracts to include communities, networks, social movements and other less formal institutions as organized activities.

Given such a broad domain, a huge fraction of economic activity, as well as much political and social activity, is undertaken in, with, or by organizations. Put differently, if organizations are how we collaborate, it is important to get them right! For example, the gains from improving production activities and supply chains in low-income countries could be enormous. Also, learning from the “bright spots” among hospitals, schools, and governments, and understanding how these successes might be spread, could be immensely valuable. Finally, although industrial productivity in high-income countries may seem mundane to some, improving the effectiveness of such firms might nonetheless allow substantial improvements in the quality of life—both for the workforces in these firms and for the communities that experience the products and externalities these firms produce.

If organizational effectiveness is so important for innovation and social impact, one might think that academics would be studying the issue actively. To some extent, this is true, but the field is badly fragmented: different disciplines operate mostly in isolation; many professional schools focus on only their own kind of organization (e.g., hospitals, schools, public agencies, businesses). Meanwhile, social-science departments often regard organizational effectiveness as outside their purview; and doctoral training in professional schools sometimes lacks the depth available in social-science departments.

In response to this situation, the 2024 summer institute will begin with presentations about how economics and sociology approach the study of organizations (with other disciplines to follow). In addition, to build community, there will be frequent group discussions and projects (“hacks”) on thorny organizational ideas and problems, as well as dinner conversations with scholars and practitioners who have been deeply involved in the worlds of politics, law, journalism and business. In sum, the first week will be a very intensive experience.

Besides the two directors, the full-time participants in the first week will be young scholars (ranging from advanced assistant professors to late-stage graduate students) drawn from a wide range of disciplines and fields (not just economics and sociology; typically also political science, communications, organizational behavior and strategy), whose careers studying organizations are underway, and who have demonstrated an interest in and an aptitude for expanding their thinking about organizations towards other disciplines.

The first week will also include a “guest chef”—a senior scholar studying organizations from outside economics and sociology—who will visit for about 24 hours, typically involving both lectures and a hack.

The second week will be in two phases. On Monday and Tuesday July 15 and 16, the full-time participants and spirit of the first week will continue. There will probably be a second guest chef, representing another discipline or methodology.

Then, on Wednesday, July 17 through Friday, July 19, participants from the fifth summer institute (2023) will be invited back to CASBS to join in a convocation with the 2024 cohort, concluding with dinner on Friday. Finally, on Saturday, July 20, the group will return to being just the directors and the 2024 full-time participants, with the institute concluding over lunch.

The second part of the second week (Wednesday, July 17 through Friday, July 19) may also include a few members of the first four cohorts (2016–19). Naturally, members of the early cohorts are now further along in their careers than the new participants in 2024 will be—albeit less far along than the senior scholars who serve as guest chefs. Also, members of the early cohorts represent a wide range of the disciplines and fields that study organizations and other organized activities; for example, fewer than half are from economics or sociology. The convocation on July 17–19 of the 2024 summer institute may leverage the expertise of the early cohorts to emphasize additional disciplines and fields studying organizations (perhaps in smaller versions of the guest-chef role described above).

ELIGIBILITY

Those eligible to apply include junior faculty, postdoctoral fellows and very advanced graduate students from the social and behavioral sciences and allied professional schools. We are also interested in applications from scholars affiliated with four-year colleges and with colleges and universities attended predominately by minority students.

Accepted applicants will be expected to arrive prepared by having read a syllabus of about 20 key papers and surveys.

LOCATION

The Center is located on a beautiful hillside overlooking the Stanford University campus. Comfortable studies in restful surroundings will be provided.

SUPPORT

Admitted applicants will be offered a fellowship that will cover all expenses, including transportation (within the usual university-mandated constraints on travel expenses). Lodging will be provided and meals will be covered. Though not required, any financial contribution from a participant’s home institution would be greatly appreciated.

APPLICATION

The application consists of: (i) a cover letter providing contact information and the name of the recommendation writer; (ii) a curriculum vitae (for faculty, this should include not only research but also courses taught; for doctoral students, not only research but also courses taken); (iii) a two-page essay explaining how the institute will advance the applicant’s research; and (iv) one letter of support, which will be treated confidentially and submitted

through our secure application system.

Application portal can be accessed at

https://applycasbs.stanford.edu/summerapplication/

Job Posting: William Burwell Harrison Distinguished Professorship of Sociology, UNC

On By Julia DessauerIn Job PostingsLeave a comment

The Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill invites applications for a Senior Full Professor to fill the William Burwell Harrison Distinguished Professorship of Sociology. We seek applications from scholars specializing in any area of Sociology who exhibit a record of strong and innovative research and excellence in teaching. Applications from scholars studying immigration, work or inequality are especially welcome. Candidates’ work should align with our departmental mission and values as outlined on our website.

https://my.asanet.org/Job-Bank-Information/Job-Bank/JBctl/ViewJob/JobID/19745

Job Posting: Open Rank – Tenure Track Faculty Position in Healthcare Management

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The Department of Health Policy & Management (HPM) of Columbia University’s, Mailman School of Public Health invites applications for a tenure-track faculty position in healthcare management at the level of assistant professor or higher, beginning 07/01/2024.

HPM seeks scholars who conduct research related to healthcare management. Individuals with doctoral degrees from any relevant field (including healthcare management, psychology, economics, sociology, management, strategy, health services research, and others) are encouraged to apply.

Assistant professor

Candidates appointed at the Assistant Professor rank will have a strong research portfolio and a commitment to excellence in both teaching and research. In particular, we seek individuals who could teach management and organizational behavior, strategy, qualitative methods, and/or quantitative methods at the Masters level.  

Associate Professor or Professor

Candidates appointed at the Associate or Professor rank will be asked to lead in both research and educational endeavors within the department.  They will have an established research portfolio, a demonstrated capacity to secure substantial external funding, and the ability to teach management and organizational behavior, strategy, qualitative methods and/or quantitative methods. 

Successful candidates will be joining one of the first health policy and management programs in the country.  Founded in 1945, HPM has a long history of participation in research, teaching, and service designed to produce more effective, efficient, and equitable health systems,

the mission of HPM’s Management Program is to conduct research that generates actionable insights and to create an inclusive educational environment for students with a range of professional and academic experience from across the globe.

Successful applicants will demonstrate an understanding of this mission.

HPM’s multidisciplinary faculty blend research and education on the development, implementation, and evaluation of health policies and the administrative functioning of health systems and organizations. We train master’s level students in health policy and health administration to become the next generation of healthcare leaders and policy makers. As a department and faculty, we maintain close ties with Columbia’s Graduate School of Business, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, College of Physicians and Surgeons, and School of International and Public Affairs, as well as with many New York area healthcare delivery and research institutions.


Application materials

To apply, please submit: 

  • a cover letter explaining your interest in the position and how your research and/or teaching demonstrates a commitment to the Management Program’s mission
  • a current curriculum vitae
  • a research statement that makes clear how your work advances the discipline of healthcare management
  • a sample of research
  • a teaching statement
  • contact information for three recommenders.  

The direct link for this position is:  https://apply.interfolio.com/134499.

Please address any questions to the search committee co-chairs, Yuna Lee (ysl2118@cumc.columbia.edu) or John McHugh (jpm2192@cumc.columbia.edu). Application deadline November 15, 2023.

Columbia University values diversity and seeks talented students, faculty, and staff from diverse backgrounds. Columbia University is an equal opportunity employer and an affirmative action employer. Columbia University is committed to ensuring that University employment is based upon personal capabilities and qualifications without discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, disability, pregnancy, sexual orientation, marital status, status as a victim of domestic violence, alienage or citizenship status, creed, genetic predisposition or carrier status, unemployment status, or any other protected characteristic as established by law.

Salary Range: $120,000 – $260,000

Assistant Professor – $120,000

Associate Professor – $140,000 – $190,000

Professor – $180,000 – $260,000